This invention relates to signs and, more particularly to a compact portable advertising display apparatus for use on restaurant tables and the like.
Advertising is an often untapped source of supplemental revenue and goodwill in restaurants or other stores where customers wait at tables for their food or wait in line, such as at a cashier, to pay for their meals or wait for other services or products. Such customers are a captive audience for many types of advertising media while they wait, eat, and sit at the tables or wait in line.
Over the years various items have been used in restaurants for the information and entertainment of customers, such as paperboard signs promoting the feature entrees or drinks of the day for the restaurant and placements mats containing various promotional information, puzzles, or games. In recent years, portable advertising displays have been placed on restaurant tables and the like, as a miniature billboard, to display various advertisements and business cards. Typifying these displays, signs, and other devices are those shown in U.S. Pat. Nos. 165,147; 2,000,419; 2,079,303; 3,364,600; 2,123,257; 2,610,421; 3,105,315; 3,561,146; 3,3,629,967; 4,125,954; 4,432,151; 4,505,059; Des. 156,670; Des. 157,446; Des. 170,650; Des. 195,270; and Des. 276,628. These prior art displays, signs, and other devices have met with varying degrees of success.
While many of the prior portable advertising displays and miniature billboards are quite useful, some of them are difficult and tedious to assemble and awkward and cumbersome to install and remove advertisements and business cards. Such difficulty can frustrate and discourage restaurant owners, patrons, and others from using such advertising displays and miniature billboards.
It is, therefore, desirable to provide an improved advertising display apparatus which overcomes most, if not all, of the preceding difficulties.